My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike by Joyce Carol Oates

In My Sister, My Love, which Oates, disingenuously, calls ‘a work of the imagination solely’, the setting is New Jersey and the murder victim is a six-year-old ice-skating prodigy called Bliss. The Ramseys have become the Rampikes - just to keep the lawyers happy, presumably. And a pretty nasty lot they are, too.

‘Dysfunctional families are all alike,’ begins Oates, in a neat inversion of the opening of Anna Karenina. But she is no Tolstoy, and given the real-life roots of the novel, her brutal caricature of middle-class dysfunctionality, New Jersey style, has a nasty reek of sarcasm.

Review: My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates - Telegraph.